Buying a case of craft beer for $28 is not bad these days. Most craft beers go for $8 per six-pack, with comparable specialty imports priced a bit higher. But four years ago I paid $28 for a single bottle of De Dolle Brouwers 20th-anniversary ale at a Belgian beer joint named Monk’s Café in Philadelphia. It was a remarkable 750-milliliter bottle that I split with three friends—but it still cost $28.

Think that’s crazy? Then so was the $45 I spent last month on a bottle of a fairly average cabernet-shiraz blend at a local restaurant. We’ve grown as accustomed to paying those prices for wine as we have to paying bottom-dollar prices for beer. But all that is changing as a handful of brewers challenge boundaries of formulation, vision, and marketing—and in the process open up craft beer to new price levels.

Consider the most expensive regularly released beer in the world, Samuel Adams Utopias, with a retail price between $120 and $160. The 2007 release of Utopias is also the world’s strongest beer, at 27 percent alcohol by volume. (Despite cries of “That’s not really beer!” Utopias certainly is beer. It was made from almost all malt, though small amounts of maple syrup were used; it was fermented to its full strength; and there was no distillation, fortification, or concentration used, which would be illegal under the terms of Boston Beer’s brewing license.) But that’s not why it’s so pricey. It’s a blend of rare and expensive aged beers, some dating back 13 years and most aged in a variety of barrels: bourbon, sherry, port, and scotch. There are, as company founder and president Jim Koch puts it, “a ton of ingredients in there, and it takes time measured in months and years.” The process also includes years of research and ideas that didn’t pan out, yeast breeding and training, the patience to hold onto the older beers, and careful blending. The bottle’s pretty nifty too: It’s an individually numbered, copper-toned decanter in the shape of a brew kettle, complete with working doors.

Happily, the beer delivers on its promise. “You’re tasting flavors that have never been created before, tastes people never tasted before,” Koch gushes—and he’s right. The brewery sponsors a promotional tour in which people are encouraged to taste Utopias blind against a Fonseca port from the excellent 1994 vintage and Cognac Frapin XO, which are both highly acclaimed—and significantly more expensive—drinks. Though not a wine or spirit, Utopias is clearly in the same league as these two beverages, with a deep complexity of flavors that reveal themselves on the tongue: malt, mint, a hint of smoke, caramel, and a wash of warm fruit flavors that finishes with a slow, lingering comfort.

The Boston Beer Co. released 12,000 bottles in October, and it doesn’t anticipate having problems selling them. In fact, retailers—which include fine restaurants, fancy liquor stores, and even the occasional corner shop—complain about not getting enough.

Three Floyds, a microbrewery in Munster, Indiana, makes an imperial stout called Dark Lord. The company sells it only at the brewery, on one day a year in April (Dark Lord Day), and it charges $15 for a 22-ounce bottle. That’s not wildly expensive, but the entire run—over 7,000 bottles—is sold on that one day; two years ago, the brewery had to institute a six-bottle-per-person limit.

“We just want to make sure everyone gets a chance,” says brewer Barnaby Struve. I know people who drive to Indiana from Philadelphia and New York for Dark Lord Day. Struve says that there were people in April 2007 who had traveled all the way from Japan and Denmark for the beer. Yes, it’s expensive, Struve acknowledges, but it includes a lot of expensive specialty malts and hops, and the tiny brewery doesn’t get the bulk discounts on malt, hops, and packaging that larger places do.

Most of the beer geeks I know are kind of, well, price sensitive. There are exceptions, of course, but not enough of them to snap up 12,000 bottles at $140 a pop, or even the full run of Dark Lord. The geeks have even complained about “other” people buying these beers, saying that they won’t appreciate them, and that they only want them in the first place because they’re expensive.

Jeff Coleman imports Fuller’s ales from Britain, and he sees a much broader crowd buying Fuller’s Vintage Ale, a $16 bottle in restaurants. One account in New York told of firms of lawyers coming for holiday lunches, specifically to drink the Fuller’s. “They’ll still be there at 5 o’clock, smoking cigars and drinking Vintage Ale,” he says.

If it’s not mainly the beer aficionados who are buying the big-ticket beers, then perhaps expensive beers represent a real breakthrough for craft brewing. Higher prices mean higher perceived quality, and if that gets people to take a sip of a great beer with an open mind (in other words, without thinking about ice-cold brews alongside hot dogs and pizza), then it could also mean customers looking at the whole range of beer in a new way. And that bodes well for the boom in craft-beer sales.

A while back, in a story for New Brewer, a brewers journal, I quoted Fritz Maytag, owner of Anchor Brewing and the so-called grandfather of the craft-brewing movement, on what small brewers could learn from small winemakers. “How to brew and sell a $50 bottle of beer,” Maytag said. Apparently some brewers were paying attention.